The Influence of Black Magic on Pop Culture

DN: Back in the 80’s, when I was a teenager, there was a public movement by some national Christian groups to attack pop culture. They made outlandish claims about demonic influence in the media, that rock n’ roll music promoted devil worship. They banned books. They protested films. Of course, my generation didn’t take their rantings seriously. We thought they were just crazy puritans with a socially conservative agenda. We worshiped pop culture. We loved our rock n’roll. We never would have imagined there was in fact some truth to these claims. Today’s generation is even more saturated by blatant occult messages. The article below is quite eye-opening.

Alan Moore, Freemasonry, and Aleister Crowley on Pop Culture

In the article “Nietzsche Goes to Hollywood,”[2] we argued that ideas are powerful and can subtly and unsuspectingly spread in many different branches. We also suggested that ideas not only have consequences but the masses can embrace a powerful idea without being aware of what they are doing.

The top grossing film in 2008, The Dark Knight, is a classic example. Alan Moore’s comic book Batman: The Killing Jokewas essential in the making of The Dark Knight. Director Christopher Nolan specifically gave the late Heath Ledger a copy of Moore’s The Killing Joke in preparation for the role.[3]

In order to understand the Joker and some of the scenes in the movie and the weltanschauung upon which pop culture is largely based, one would do well to explore the world of Alan Moore himself and Aleister Crowley.

Here’s how Moore described his writings:

“I found that I couldn’t progress any further with writing by strict rationality. If I wanted to go further with my writing, make it more intense, more powerful, make it say what I wanted to say, I had to take a step beyond technique and rational ideas about writing, into something that was trans-rational if you will. This being magic.”[4]

Moore goes on to admit: “I’ve done some bits of artwork purely for my own consumption of some of the things that I’ve seen during magical rituals.”[5]

Moore continues to say that during his teenage years he had “a brief flirtation with Dennis Wheatley,” which he viewed as “a heady mixture of Satanism and the supernatural.”[6]

In a nutshell, Moore found out that strict rationality and magic do not go together. Rationality, as the ancient Greeks tell us, is reason, logos, order, and harmony. It is part of the “governing principle of the universe…” The Greek philosopher Heraclitus attributed to a person. This seems to correspond to what the gospel of John is saying.[7]

In other words, for Moore magic is “trans-rational,” which is another way of saying that it is irrational. And it is in the realm of the irrational that most of Moore’s greatest works came from—and this includes Watchmen, From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and V for Vendetta, which have been translated into major motion pictures.[8]

Moore is also a practitioner of black magic. At one point, he declared that “My magical life probably takes as much of my time as my comic book life.”[9]

What is also interesting is that Moore was enthralled by the writings and magical rituals of Aleister Crowley, the infamous black magician in the twentieth century who revived sexual magic in major centers in Europe and America.[10] Moore stated:

“I’d known about Crowley ever since I was twelve, when I had my spate of reading Dennis Wheatley occult paperbacks and being told that Aleister Crowley was the wickedest man in the world. There are references to Crowley in V for Vendetta…”[11]

Crowley was also a freemason and Cabbalist[12]and proclaimed the rejection of all morals. Like Friedrich Nietzsche before him, Crowley reasoned that if God is dead, then it follows metaphysically that ultimate telos is out of the question. If ultimatetelos is out of the question, then metaphysical nihilism follows. And for Crowley, the ultimate force that can stop nihilism is Christianity.

There were only two options in Crowley’s mind when he set his feet in the occult world: it was either Christianity or metaphysical chaos that will win in the end. The die was cast.

The gospels declare that when Christ was about to be crucified, He prayed, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.”

Crowley reversed these words and intoned his most quoted maxim in a magical ritual: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law…There is no law beyond do what thou wilt.”[13]

During the same ritual, Crowley actually crucified a frog as a form of blasphemy. Lawrence Sutin of Hamline University declared that Crowley chose a specific day because it was consistent with kabbalistic magic. During the same ceremony, Crowley intoned,

“Lo, Jesus of Nazareth, how thou art taken in my snare. All my life long thou hast plagued me and affronted me. In thy name—with all other free souls in Christendom—I have been tortured in my boyhood; all delights have been forbidden unto me, and that which is owed to me they pay not—in thy name.

“Now at last I have thee…the Slave-God is in the power of the Lord of Freedoom…Give thou place to me, O Jesus; thine eon is passed; the Age of Horus is arisen by the Master the Great Beast that is a man…I To Mega Therion therefore condemn thee Jesus the Slave-God to be mocked and spat upon and scourged and then crucified.”[14]

Sutin writes, “The sentence was then executed, with the legs of the animal eaten to confirm the magical link between Magus and frog—which, invested with the spirit of Jesus, now served as a willing familiar. The rest of the body was burned to signify the end of the Old Aeon.”[15]

The man known as “The Beast” worked tirelessly throughout his life to bring about the sexual revolution. The young and innocent were Crowley’s primary target.

He declared,

“Let me seduce the boys [of England]. Then these boys, become men, [will] bring about the new Heaven and the new Earth…for the transvaluation of all values must yet again take place…but without an army I am useless. Give me an army, young men; and we will sweep those dogs into the sea.”[16]

Crowley, like Friedrich Nietzsche before him, saw the arts as a weapon that would play an influential role in the sexual revolution.[17] In fact, the dagger that was used to crucify the frog was called “dagger of art.”

Crowley said, “That religion they call Christianity; the devil they honor they call God. I accept these definitions, as a poet must do, if he is to be at all intelligible to his age, and it is their God and their religion that I hate and will destroy.”[18]

In the end, Crowley died perplexed and in despair in 1947.[19] Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Crowley did not live to see the sexual revolution, although he longed to see its fruition during his day.[20]

Yet Crowley’s Masonic/Kabbalistic doctrine—do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law—never lost its potency. It has been echoed and manifested time and again through many different branches and offshoots.

The Beatles put Crowley’s picture on the cover album of Stg. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. John Lennon declared, “The whole idea was to do what you want. Do what thou wilst, as long as it doesn’t hurt somebody.”[21]

When asked why the Beatles placed people like Crowley and others on the cover of their album, Paul McCartney said that those people were “our heroes,” and Ringo Starr responded, “[People] we like and admire.”[22]

Sting, Daryl Hall, Marilyn Manson, Timothy Leary (former professor of psychology at Harvard), Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson, etc., have all followed Crowley’s occult doctrine in one way or another, directly or indirectly.

Jimmy Page in particular was so immersed in Crowley’s ritual magic that he bought Crowley’s own house near Loch Ness, Scotland.[24] Here’s a description of the house:

“The building was erected on the site of a church that had burned to the ground with all of its unfortunate congregation trapped inside. Prior to Crowley’s taking occupancy, a beheading and a host of suicides had taken place within the walls. After Crowley’s passing, several tenants went straight from the house to insane asylums.

“Thus acquiring something of a sinister reputation, the address became difficult to rent or sell, but, in the mid-seventies, a realtor negotiated its purchase for Jimmy Page, avid devotee of mysticism and magick, lead guitarist of the Yardbirds and of Led Zepplin, the latter one of the most popular bands in the world. Asked why he picked the remote place as a hideaway, Page said, “I’m attracted by the unknown.”[25]

Page at one time owned Crowley’s “artifacts—books, first editions, manuscripts, hats, canes, paintings, even the robes in which Crowley had conducted rituals.”[26]

L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the religious group Scientology, which has a long list of Hollywood followers such as Tom Cruise and Will Smith,[27] was strongly influenced by Crowley. In fact, Hubbard strongly recommended one of Crowley’s books—The Master Therion, which was later published under the title Magic: In Theory and Practice—in one of his speeches.

Hubbard’s own son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr., declared that his father was “a wife-beater who had experimented black magic… ‘he had one of those insane things, especially during the ‘30s, of trying to invoke the devil for power and practice. My mother told me about him trying out all kinds of various incantations, drugs and hypnosis…’”[28]

Hubbard Jr., again declared: “Black magic is the inner core of Scientology, and it is probably the only part of Scientology that really works.”

More recently, the British newspaper the Daily Mail breaks its silence saying that celebrities such as Jay-Z have been covert followers of Aleister Crowley and devotees of the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis), an occult group originally associated with Freemasonry. The article declares,

“Crowley’s motto — perpetuated by OTO — was ‘do what thou wilt’. And it is this individualistic approach that has led to a lasting fascination among artists and celebrities, of whom Peaches is the latest in a long line.

“Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, for example, routinely took part in occult magical rituals and was so intrigued by Crowley he bought his former home, Boleskine House, on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland. And there are now OTO lodges scattered around the country, practicing the same ceremonial rituals and spreading the word of Crowley.

“While membership is secret, Peaches is said to have been initiated into it, raising the prospect that many of her impressionable fans could try to do the same. Indeed, when one of her Twitter followers asked how she could find out more about Thelema, another word for Crowley’s teachings, Peaches directed her to read his books, which she described as ‘super interesting’.

“Other celebrities linked to OTO include the rapper Jay-Z, who has repeatedly purloined imagery and quotations from Crowley’s work. Whether wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Do what thou wilt’ or hiring Rihanna to hold aloft a flaming torch in his music videos (a reference to the Illuminati, an outlawed secret society whose name supposedly derives from Lucifer, or ‘light bringer’), he has given the sect priceless publicity.

“His clothing line, Rocawear, is shot through with OTO imagery such as the ‘all seeing eye’ in a triangle, the ‘eye of Horus’ (an ancient Egyptian symbol frequently referenced in occult texts) and the head of Baphomet (the horned, androgynous idol of Western occultism).

“Some conspiracy theorists have seized on this as evidence that he is a member of a secret Masonic movement which they believe permeates the highest levels of business and government. Others take a more pragmatic view: that it is commercial opportunism, cashing in on impressionable teens’ attraction to the ‘edginess’ of occult symbolism.

“Yet OTO is much more than a marketing opportunity for attention-seeking celebs. It is a living religion, with adherents still practicing occult rituals set out by Crowley in his books.”[29]

Jay Z, of course, denied any involvement in the occult, even though his videos and songs and his wife’s performance on stage are suffused with cryptic illusions to the Illuminati and Freemasonry.[30]

Jay Z may want to deny all these facts, but his lyrics and songs tell us something different. “Jay Z refers to himself as Jayhovah, a variation of the Kabbalistic tetragrammaton, or the so-called divine name.”[31] (More recently, Kanye West names his album Yeezus, which seems to be an inversion of Jesus._

Jay Z sings, “Hail Mary to the city you’re a Virgin/And Jesus can’t save you, life starts when the church ends…” Kanye West indirectly follows that concept by being crucified on the cross. The late Tupac Shakur did the same thing.

(Jewish designer Rubin Singer is the man behind Beyonce’s clothes during the Super Bowl half-time report. Singer’s grandfather “created clothes for the highest officials of the USSR, including Stalin.”[32])

Even editor-in-chief of Tacher/Penguin Mitch Horowitz declared that he was not impressed with Jay Z’s denial. When Jay Z wore a sweater with the phrase ‘do what thou wilt,” Horowitz declared,

“Yes, that has very deep roots in modern occult culture. The full expression is ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’ That was one of the key maxims of the British occultist Aleister Crowley. So when Jay-Z appears in a hoodie with that phrase on it in public, that’s exactly what he’s referencing.”[33]

Aleister Crowley formulated a famous occult maxim in his work Magick to the young and eager student:

“Let the Exempt Adept first train himself to think backwards by external means as set forth here following: a) Let him learn to write backwards with either hand; b) Let him learn to walk backwards;

“c) Let him constantly watch, if convenient, cinematograph films, and listen to phonograph records, reversed, and let him so accustom himself to these that they appear natural and appreciable as a whole; d) Let him practice speaking backwards.”[34]

And Michael Jackson made walking backwards very popular in the 1980s with the advent of the moonwalk. Timothy Fitzpatrick of Culture Wars magazine has written an excellent article showing that modern popular music in general has its root in Freemasonry—and those who made this possible were largely Jewish or part of the Jewish matrix.

Crowley and Pop Culture

Kanye West on a cross

In other words, the sexual calculus occult nature that people like Jay Z, Rihanna, Beyonce, Kanye West and others have created for themselves was spiritually born out of Crowley’s sexual rituals and Freemasonry. Rihanna’s and Beyonce’s sexually explicit videos, in other words, are all indirect manifestations of Crowley’s vision of the sexual revolution.

Whether they like it or not, Beyonce, Rihanna and others are indirectly supporting Crowley’s work. Crowley would have been proud to give them great accolades and would have almost certainly supported their explicitly sexual videos.

It was Crowley to said that “Lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture. Fear not that any God shall deny thee for this.” Decades later, Wilhelm Reich, the Jewish psychoanalyst who unleashed a flood of sexual ideology in the twentieth century, wrote in The Sexual Revolution:

“Sexual potency and physical vigor and beauty must become the permanent ideals of the revolutionary freedom movement.”[35]

Little did Beyonce and others know that they would play an influential in this “revolutionary freedom movement.”

Rebecca Nicholson of the British newspaper the Guardian did not hesitate to write that Beyonce “might be an Illuminati robot…”[36] This is not far-fetched. Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati, “created a system of ‘Seelenspionage’ that would allow him to control his adepts without their knowing that they were being controlled.”[37]

Modern Crowleyites

Perhaps one of the unsuspecting Crowleyites of our time is Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian novelist whose best-selling book The Alchemist has been translated into more than 60 languages. Will Smith, in a public interview with Tarvis Smiley, declared that Coelho’s The Alchemist is one of his favorite books.[38]

In Coelho’s autobiography The Valkyries: An Encounter with Angels, we read:

“[Coelho] liked the Beast’s ideas because they were rebellious. And very few people had ever heard them. And people are always more respectful to those who speak of things no one understands. As for the rest—Hare Krishna, Children of God, the Church of Satan, Mahrishi—everyone knew about those. The Beast [Crowley]—the Beast was just for the chosen few!”[39]

Both Coelho and his wife “learned about sexual magic.”[40] During one occult experiment, Coelho’s wife began to

“say things that made no sense, that were absurd. Paul had explained that this was one way of channeling: speak. Conquer your second mind, and allow the universe to do what it wanted with it. She began to move her head back and forth, wanting to do all that, and suddenly she wanted to make strange noises. And she did so. It wasn’t ridiculous. She was free to do what she pleased. She had no idea where these things came from—but they were coming from within, from the bottom of her soul, and manifesting themselves.”[41]

Over the next few years, Coelho and his partners began to earn large sums of money, and “the royalties they earned were being used to buy a lot near Rio de Janeiro. There they would recreate what, almost one hundred years earlier, the

Beast had tried to establish in Cefalu, Sicily. But the Beast was

expelled by the Italian authorities.”[42]

So the logic is pretty simple. Aleister Crowley was a 33rd degree mason, and his Masonic works, most notablyMagick: In Theory and Practice, had far reaching consequences in Europe and America. As rabbi Geoffrey W. Dennis himself declares in The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism,

“Virtually every form of Western mysticism and spiritualism known today draws upon Jewish mythic and occult teachings—magic, prayer, angelology, numerology, astral projection, dream interpretation, astrology, amulets, divination, altered states of consciousness, alternative healing and ritual power—all have roots in the Jewish occult.”[43]

In other words, Winston Churchill was right when he stated that “It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people.”[44]

Crowley was so serious about his sexual magic that he performed sodomy on an Orthodox Jew by the name of Victor Neuberg in 1913 in Paris.[45]

(photo: Rihanna in a pentagram)

Crowley sought to annihilate Christianity but failed. But Crowley’s disciples—and Alan Moore and Timothy Leary in particular—had planned to finish the subversive banner of what Crowley had started. Leary declared some years ago on the widely viewed television show Late Night America:

“I’ve been an admirer of Aleister Crowley. I think that I’m carrying on much of the work that he started over a hundred years ago. He was in favor of finding yourself, and ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ under love. It was a very powerful statement. I’m sorry he isn’t around now to appreciate the glories he started.”

Alan Moore intended to follow on that tradition more directly. He unapologetically declared, “The actual religion Christianity is obviously something that is completely soul-destroying.”

In order carry on that plan properly, Alan Moore more declared specifically that propaganda ought to be used in both films and comic books.[46]

We have already seen that Moore could not progress on a rational ground with his writing. When the irrational is out of the equation, all things are possible, including standing on the edge of a schizophrenic state:

“I decided I was going to become magician…all of a sudden the lightening bold hit. It all got a bit strange. For a couple of months after that, I was looking back probably in some borderline of schizophrenic state. I was spaced out—godstruck, you babble for a while…Babble like an idiot…I must have been unbearable for two or three months. I’ve integrated that now into the rest of my life.”[47]

We see flashes of Crowley’s maxim—do what thou wilt—throughout Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta.

And small doses of pornographic images and illusions are found in several parts of Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke. Alan Moore has said that he has used pornographic images in his books to seduce the masses.[48]

Even Nick Owchar of the L.A. Times has denounced the book: “Alan Moore and Brian Bolland imagined a chilling villain whose skeletal grin and appetite for sadism are definitely not for children (nor some adults).”[49]

Striking similarities between Moore’s The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight can hardly be dismissed. For example, the interrogation scene between the Joker and Batman in the jail cell in the movie is taken straight from the graphic novel, although director Christopher Nolan dressed it up a little. And the last conversation between Batman and the Joker is again a dressed up version taken from novel.

Nolan declares, “I would certainly point to ‘The Killing Joke’ but I also would point very much to the first two appearances of the Joker in the comic. If you look at where the Joker comes from there’s a very clear direction that fits what we’re doing very well.”[50]

Writer Jason Pinter declares “The Killing Joke is one of the most daring and original Batman stories ever written, and if you’re curious to learn some of the inspiration behind the big screen vision, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.”[51]

Alan Moore and Pornography

Moore’s recent contribution has been in the world of pornography. He declared, “Most pornography is simply horrible, and not just from a woman’s perspective.”

He continued, “We felt we could reclaim and redefine what pornography was, and we deliberately chose to use that word. We didn’t want to hide behind ‘erotica’ – because it’s not etymologically accurate for one thing, and I’m very fussy about that kind of stuff, and there’s a class element to it. Pornos graphos – drawings or writings of wantons – that will do.”[52]

Steve Rose of the Guardian writes of Moore’s recent comic book Lost Girls:

“Lost Girls demonstrates what comics can do that movies can’t – or at least shouldn’t. The story centres on three fictional women – Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Peter Pan’s Wendy and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, whose sexual exploits at an Austrian hotel it details with a mix of Carry On-style humour and De Sadean exhaustiveness. Wendy gets it on with the Lost Boys, Dorothy gets it on with the Tin Man, everyone gets it on with everyone, in fact. There are polysexual orgies, incest, bestiality, semi-pubescent sex – polite softcore it is not.

“But in a country that’s still only comfortable acknowledging bad literary sex, the shamelessness is utterly refreshing, even – dare anyone ever admit it – arousing. As always with Moore, he’s done his homework, (including Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Carter and feminist critiques of pornography), and Lost Girls takes in the history of sexual literature, the impact of modernism, war, sexual repression and the ethics of the imagination.

“And even if Gebbie’s illustrations leave very little to that imagination, they’re dreamy and sensual rather than cold and anatomical…”[53]

The ideological/occult trajectory that both Crowley and Moore have unleashed upon pop culture is far and wide, and both individuals will continue to impact pop culture in a potent way through music and movies.[54]

[29] Richard Price, “Forget Scientology, celebs are now falling for an even more sinister ‘religion’: Introducing the Satanic sex cult that’s snaring stars such as Peaches Geldof,” Daily Mail, April 21, 2013; for similar stories, see also “Peaches Geldof has Signed up to Aleister Crowley’s Sex Cult OTO,” Guardian, April 15, 2013.